Reviews

Victoria Mahoney is herself and made the first feature film depicting the lives of children of a "mixed-race" couple (citation Mahoney). Sweetness (played by Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz) is the name of an adolescent girl who is being the subject of racism from both sides, black and white. Her father (white) is a manic-depressive, violent alcoholic, while her mother seems on the edge of killing herself. When her older sister finally leaves the house to give birth to a child, Sweetness decides to turn around and be the bully instead of being bullied. This movie has not gotten a lot of appreciation or positive reviews by the media. Unrightfully so! I find it to be a powerful and intriguing movie with a lot of almost physically tangible anger and heart. Also stars Gabourey Sidibe in a small role.

Director Cathérine Breillat folds two fairy tales into another, one of her own design and the classic narrative theme Barbe Bleue (King Blue-beard). I guess she deliberately renders the performances and sets artificial and hollow. This is for example clearly indicated in the tower stairs scene, where the same part of the spiral stairs is shown over and over again to give the impression of a high tower but there are distinctive parts showing it's always the same. As if this wasn't already clear enough, at one point she needlessly lets the image flip to show its cut. I interpret this as a cryptic reflection of narrative tradition where she blends the image of the girl devouring King Blue beard into a new image of the girl's courage and fearless endeavor. Hence Lola Creton is the only one who seems to be allowed to give a glowing performance and so she does. A difficult film, but worth a watch if anything of the above made sense to you or you know and like Breillat's unconventional work.

Oh well, we have a directing debut here and quite an impressive one at that. Good camera, beautiful images and musical score, this narration is set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania.

Spoiler: Our female Protagonist, impressively played by Hilda Péter, had been raped by two men in the past. When the truth about this incident which she had been hiding and which resulted in the birth of her only child, a son, comes to light ten years after, she is cast out by her husband and decides to take revenge on the men who raped her. She takes her wagon and her son and sets out on a journey of tracking down the men, planning on confronting and killing them. This narration clearly is based on Mihail Sadoveanu's famous novel "Baltagul" (The Hatchet) which is transforming the traditional Romanian theme of the ballad "Mioriţa" into a modern detective story and blending the traditional role of a Romanian woman into Modernism. Our protagonist starts on a similar journey but the ends which we are facing are showing cruelly how Sadoveanu's story could have ended more realistically.

This is a very well written tale about the odyssey of an illegal immigrant into the European Union. Our hero arrives by boat on the shores of Greece, hides in a Luxury tourist resort called "Eden Resort" and after many adventures there travels to Paris to meet a magician with whom he made acquaintance in the tourist club. We witness the adventures of Elias, our hero, only to see through his eyes the different approaches of Europeans to illegal immigrants living and struggling in their midst. Excellent camera work, brilliant performance by Riccardo Scamarcio, masterful narration by Costa-Gavras. I recommend watching this strongly.

Mammoth tells the story of a rich New Yorker couple and their daughter and their nanny and her family. While the one side - she is a doctor and he is some kind of creative director at a tremendously successful gaming website - has more money to spend than is good for them, the other side - their Philippine nanny - is working in New York to earn the money for her kids at home. The movie seems to enjoy the contrast between rich and poor in a grotesque manner yet doesn't manage to achieve anything profound. The result is cliché and commonplace up to total boredom or a hidden sarcasm I don't understand. After the previous works of Moodysson, "Fucking Åmål", "Tilsamman" and "Lilya 4Ever" this disappointment leaves me absolutely puzzled.

This is a highlight. "Adam resurrected" is a powerful narration about a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor and his struggle to cope with his traumata in a psycho-therapeutic clinic in Israel. Adam Stein, our protagonist, embodied by Jeff Goldblum, has survived a German concentration camp but lost his family. An SS-officer made him live and behave like a dog and it is only when another dog-like being arrives in the clinic that Stein finds a way to escape his manic world of excess. An extraordinarily mighty and brilliant performance by Jeff Goldblum who carries the whole movie to a difficult, funny and intense experience.

I have just seen this in cinema. Francis Ford Coppola adapted a novella by Romanian theologian and writer Mircea Eliade: "Tânereţe fără bătreneţe şi viaţa fără de moarte" which I would translate as "Youth without ageing and life without death" but has been published under the name the film has now.

The film's plot in short: A romanian Orientalism-professor has lost the love of his life when he was still young and lives as an old man now in fear that he wouldn't be able to finish his one great book about the origins of language and the birth of consciousness (a feeling we all know oh too well, don't we? ;-) ). By accident he acquires (eternal?) youth again and is endowed with supernatural intellectual powers which might help him finish his work when he gets access not only to his lost love again but also to the foundations of men's language.

I haven't read the novel as I almost ignored Eliade's work for years now so I cannot comment on issues of adaptation. This certainly has become a complex and phantastic (in a genre sense) movie which leaves the viewer with many open questions and does not try to really solve the logical problems composed by the plot which does justice to Eliade's intentions I would guess and to the topic for sure. As much as I like the topos and seeing something intelligent (compare the hilarious "Man from Earth") on screen dealing with philosophical issues, I cannot _really_ say that this was well executed, though. It certainly has been a daring enterprise and did not totally fail. Performance by Tim Roth is brilliant, a very good choice, too. Lara is doing well although I can't stand her German accent when talking English. Camera is OK, imagery is OK.

On a sidenote: it is amazing how Eliade's vanity shone through the writing into this film - even without having read the novel myself.

When I took my seat in the cinema I was in a cool mood and didn't plan on changing it. But this movie is a dramatic powerhouse. I was all in sweat and needed a shower afterward. So what have we? Theoretically a coming of age story of a teenage Turkish girl living in Copenhagen, Denmark. It came to my mind soon that the plot seemed pretty much completely borrowed from "Bend it like Beckham", where we had an Indian girl playing football and spoiling the wedding of her sister. Here we have it transferred to a Turkish girl spoiling her brother's wedding by doing Kung Fu. And we have a love story and a competition of course, too. After I accepted this, this really turned out to be a gripping, emotional drama and it shows off some beautiful Kung Fu (I'm not an expert, though). The lead actress Semra Turan is not only Denmark's female champion but she also delivers an excellent performance, so that it appears to be safe to assume that we have quite some autobiographic impressions here taking into account that this is her first movie and that she has no education as an actress. Rest of the supporting cast is okay, camera good, Kung Fu intense. Sidenotes: - The male Turkish audience showed respect so that they must have done something right. - The audience burst into cheers when our heroine finally fought back and attacked the boys who were gravely beating up her brother in revenge. - Xian Gao, a Chinese cinematic Kung Fu instructor/actor (Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon) played the lead role's master

If you get the chance to see this in cinema do it, you'll probably have a good and intense experience and I don't know if this works on small screen as well